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Tabloidization: Step forward or backward?
After hanging-over at the pub, no one could deny that life has to be back to normal. The ephemeral exhilaration from the intoxication of alcohol couldn’t enable me to ignore the tremendous pressure from the real life and academic work. After the perfect opening-up by the presentation for the master study, work continuously needs to be undertaken.
Prof. Colin Sparks threw a second bomb to us, asking us to write an essay about 4,000 words to discuss the media trend of tabloidization. For my one and half months experience in London, I found out that tabloidization has been prevailing among British papers. I had read a book named The Observation of British Newspapers by a Chinese journalist from the Shenzhen Daily, who had undertaken his study at the University of Warwick in 2003. He visited and interviewed 21 news organizations including 20 papers and one news surveillance institute. When I read that book at the very initial time, I was impressed by the avant-garde concepts of doing journalism and ambitious ways of management. When I started my academic life in the UK, I was sincerely amazed and impressed by the missions impossible he had endeavored to achieve. In one chapter of that book, he had a very close depiction of tabloidization of the British papers in recent years.
Tabloidization happened in the States a century ago when industrialization promoted the development of printers. The rolling printers granted great liberty to press workers at that time and cheap pop newspapers took the place of political big papers as the domination of the press market. However, different from counterparts of America, British broadsheets didn’t give up their dignity as their high tastes until modernization or electronic times tore up the noblest signal of broadloids. Apart from the Sun and the Daily Mirror which are selling breasts and gossips to attract readers’eyes, the conventional broadsheets like the Times and the Guardian had started to promote their tabloidised editions and add much more entertaining elements into their whole layouts to attract young readers and cultivate the younger generations’reading habits. Now the tabloidised Times has no difference with the Evening Standard, a very large spurring picture will enter your vision at the first time.
The circulation of broadsheets has been rocketing in recent years while they started to convert themselves as tabloids. Obviously, in a short term economic effect, this strategy was successful. But when I referred this phenomenon to Colin, he showed me a very profound smile and mentioned the questions of consideration about the downsides of tabloidization. Although it greatly increases the sales volume, it still degrades the readers’tastes. Broadloids’tabloidization degrades its style and absolutely challenges their old, stable readers’conventional reading habits. However, if they fails to cultivate adequate young elite readers who embrace certain consuming and investing abilities, they will be trapped into harassment and a dilemma of continuing entertainment or back to the serious. Who knows? Maybe the heads of the British broadsheets are twisting their brains to work out this issue.
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